The practice method

How to practice jazz guitar without a guitar

By Oliver Duschka, the developer of Drop2

The commute, the hotel room, the hour before the house wakes up. Most advice for these is some form of miming, and nobody has ever got better at miming. What survives the instrument being gone is the half of playing that was never in your hands — and there is one test for whether an exercise belongs to it.

The half that was never in your hands

Every jazz-guitar skill splits in two: knowing what to play, and making your hands do it. Only the second half needs the guitar. And past the first year or so, the second half is rarely the thing standing in your way.

Watch where a ii–V–I actually falls apart at tempo. The Dm7 does not arrive, and it is almost never because your fingers could not have made the shape — you have made that shape a thousand times. It is that you did not know which shape, soon enough. Beat one arrives whether or not the grip does, and what failed was recall, not dexterity. The same goes for the reason a solo comes out sounding like a scale: running the scale is the easy part; knowing which note in it is the 3rd of the chord going past is the part that was missing.

Those are the failures a bus stop can fix. They are made of names, spellings, sounds and forms, and none of the four requires an instrument to be in the room.

You can only practice what you can be wrong about

Collect the standard advice for guitarless practice and you get the same list every time: visualize the fretboard, mime the fretting hand, draw a neck on paper, listen actively. The trouble is not that the items are wrong. It is that most of them have no verdict. You cannot fail at miming a barre chord. Nothing comes back and tells you that was an E♭, not an E — and learning is that correction. Take it away and what is left is a ritual.

So there is one test, and it is short: can you be wrong at it, and find out?

Visualization passes, but only with its second half attached. “Picture the neck” is not practice. “Where is A♭ on the D string?” is practice, because it has an answer — the sixth fret — and you either had it or you did not.

The four that survive

Naming. A note and a string, and you find it: C♯ on the fifth string, fourth fret. Six strings and twelve frets is a small enough world to carry around, and every question in it has exactly one right answer, which is what makes it checkable on a platform. Work one string at a time rather than the whole neck at once.

Spelling. The one almost nobody does, and the one that pays the most. Which four notes make Fmaj7? Which of them is the 3rd, which the 7th? Take it as a drop-2 voicing with the 5th on the bottom — which note ends up singing on top? (The 7th.) That last question is the whole of what the chord pages are built on, and it is answerable in your head, in a queue, in about four seconds. Then the chart calls a chord you have never voiced and you are not starting from nothing.

Hearing. The one that needs only earbuds. Intervals first, then chord qualities — major 7th against dominant 7th is one note and a whole different room. Then the sounds that carry harmony: the 7th falling a half step onto the next chord's 3rd, which is the sound of a ii–V resolving, and the short cells lines are actually built from. Sing them back before you name them; naming without singing turns ear training into a quiz.

The form. Take one tune and recite its changes from memory, in roman numerals, in tempo, without looking. Most players know a tune's melody far better than its harmony, and the gap shows up the moment somebody counts one off. The progression pages are the forms worth knowing cold; the recitation costs three minutes and no equipment.

The same twenty minutes

Those four fill a session on their own. Here is one arrangement of them, sized like the twenty-minute routine it stands in for:

Hearing takes the largest share because it is the slowest of the four to move and the easiest to skip. Naming and spelling are quick because they are recall, and recall is done the moment the answer arrives or fails to — sitting on a question you have already missed teaches nothing that asking it again tomorrow will not teach better. The form goes last for the same reason the played routine ends inside music: it is the block that sounds like a tune, even when the tune is only in your head.

Why it matters musically

Because a bandstand is a memory test with a metronome attached. Nothing you play there is worked out; it is retrieved, at a deadline somebody else set. A voicing you can reconstruct in five seconds is theory, and a voicing that arrives on beat one is vocabulary — and the distance between the two is pure recall, which is exactly the part that does not need the guitar to train.

Which turns the guitarless session from a consolation prize into something a little uncomfortable: it is the practice with the mechanics stripped out, and what is left underneath is where most of the failures on the stand actually live. That is also why it is unpopular. Playing scales feels like practicing. Being asked which note tops an F7 in second inversion, and not knowing, feels like being caught.

Does visualizing the fretboard actually work?

Yes, when it ends in an answer you can check, and not otherwise. The players who swear by it — Howard Roberts sitting across the room from his guitar is the famous example — are not daydreaming about a neck; they are asking it questions and getting them right or wrong. Picture the fifth string, put the 3rd of a B♭7 on it, name the fret. That is a question with one answer.

Without the question, visualization is just a pleasant image of yourself playing well, which is the one form of practice that reliably produces nothing. Add the question and it is the cheapest drill you own.

Is practicing without a guitar as good as practicing with one?

No, and it is not built to be. It removes the mechanics, and the mechanics are half of playing — time, touch, the small physical truths about a stretch that only your hand can tell you. Nothing here replaces picking the instrument up.

What it does replace is the alternative, which is usually nothing at all. A week with the guitar in another city is a week the queue keeps filling, and twenty minutes of naming and hearing on the train is the difference between coming home behind and coming home level. Treat it as the half of the session you can always do, rather than as a substitute for the half you cannot.

Where Drop2 comes in

The Drop2 app already contains this half of the practice, and is about to contain more of it. The ear trainer needs no guitar and no microphone at all: it plays an interval, a chord quality or a cadence and you answer on the neck, and you can hold any answer to hear it before you commit — free to practice, with no time limit. Because every trainer feeds one spaced-repetition engine, the queue you empty on a train is the same queue waiting at home; the daily plan that decides what is due is part of Premium, which starts with a 7-day free trial. Two tap drills are a coming addition — the app naming a note and a string for you to find by tapping the neck, and naming a chord and the voice on top for you to build with four taps. That is the naming and the spelling blocks above, with a verdict attached.

Next: How long does it take to learn jazz guitar? →